Study on Strategic Use of Language in Newspaper Headlines: Weighing the Comprehensiveness and News Worthiness of Newspaper Headlines

Mass Media?s success depends on the efficiency of communicating messages to its target audiences. For newspapers,a clear and interesting communication is essential and thus, an easily comprehensible language is necessary. In theory, a headline encapsulates the story in minimum number of words and attracts the reader's attention. To write an effective headline,journalists use various techniques of language that may not be familiar to the popular readers. Overtime, the headline writers have developed a vocabulary that fulfils the requirement of a good headline by using words that are short and precise. However, sometimes over simplicity of headlines leads to confusion and ambiguity. This attribute can be used to gain more readership and many do it consciously. This research is an effort to analyse the format and structure of news headlines given in various English newspapers and studies closely the strategic usage of words and their consequent effect on reader's understandability.